DSL Duh

I am the first to admit I'm not a big fan of ADSL. I have a cable ISP myself,
However my wife's friend Shari uses the local telco as her ISP so she has one of those 2-Wire DSL gateways.
Today Shari tried to relocate her gateway and laser printer to another room by herself - knowing nothing about networking. Of course she failed so I had to go over this afternoon.
Shari's laser printer is network capable through a CAT5 cable - not wireless. She doesn't know the difference between RJ45 and CAT5 so of course she put the gateway too far away and couldn't connect. I relocated the gateway and reconnected the Ethernet cable and soon the LAN was back working with both computer and printer online.
The WAN was another matter. No Internet or DSL at all. I rebooted the gateway. Nothing. Checked the LAN. Everything was fine. Checked the gateway through a browser. No Internet, no DSL. The Internet light on the gateway was off. DSL blinking but not connecting. The PPPoE settings were fine.
We checked with a phone and the RJ45 cable and jack were OK. Dial tone, no problem.
At this point I called up Bell tech service. The helpful guy on the other end did some tests.
"I don't see the gateway receiving the DSL signal. Try reversing the cable."
When we did this I spotted a phone filter on the line.
" Should we have a filter on the gateway cable?"
"No sir. Those filters stop DSL signals from getting to the plain old telephones. It wouldn't be a good idea to filter DSL from the gateway."
Well, duh. I took the filter off the DSL line and the lights started glowing. Internet restored.
I had to reconfigure the printer so it was default because Shari had somehow set the printer software to send everything to a .pdf. After that everything worked fine.
You learn something new every day, even if it's NOT how to set something up.

Ah, good ol' DSL with the filters and all that baloney. I remember it well. I was so thrilled to go from dial-up to DSL way back when. I was like traveling in a train and then changing over to a sleek race car. I really love my DSL; that is until I discovered FIOS. At 50Mbps/50Mbps, I am zipping along in a rocket ship these days; about 16X the speed of my old DSL.

I never liked Cable Internet because you have to share the bandwidth with the whole neighborhood. In congested citified areas, this could really slow you down certain times of day. I prefer the dedicated pipe.

Back when I lived in Georgetown, before I moved here, I had only the option of DSL. When I got to Almonte I had only the option of cable. FIOS is still not available in my neighborhood although in newer areas at the east end of town they wired it in when they built the subdivision. If I were to go with a telco I'd have plain old DSL and a satellite dish for TV. At least cable gives me decent speeds under most circumstances.
Right now I'm getting about 16 down and 10 up over the wifi LAN. I am sure I'd be faster upstairs where I'm wired into the router.

I remember when my folks moved into a new home and without speaking to me about their options for broadband. Their new home was a demo unit and acted as an office for the development, and all the phone lines were hooked into a KSU that the developer had self-installed.

Audio on the phone lines inside the house was always faint and there was a huge amount of static on the lines no matter who you called, even to the next door neighbors, which meant the call was never routed out the CO.

Naturally, my folks went with ADSL, the cheapest tier (8Mbps?) and signed a year long contract. The DSL would occasionally reach 768Kbps, but most of the time hovered around 640Kbps, and the ADSL modem would typically lock up 2-3 days. I think it was a Fujitsu model, and ran very, very hot. Packet loss usually hovered around 60%, sometimes edging up to 70%.

I was so happy to have ripped that thing out and replace it with a basic cable modem bought from the local Best Buy. It was at least a 25Mbps connection, which was the minimum tier, although it may now be even higher if the cable company bumped it up to whatever the new base pages is out there.

Of course, you can be in a place with great ADSL and lousy cable service, but in the few places I've lived (CA, CO), cable providers offer much faster connections (300Mbps cable vs 40Mbps ADSL, for example).

Back when I got stsrted with broadband in Canada, either the telco offered service and the cable guy did not, or vice-versa. Given the option I would choose cable. Of course if you can get FIOS that might be a different matter. In Almonte only the telco offers that, and only in the newest areas.

A friend of mine, who has a home on 7 acres in what used to be a farming/rural area of the county, had dial-up initially. However, a couple years later they build a huge (800 home) development right adjacent to his property. Once they did that, the cable company that was servicing the new development offered service to him also. It was advertised at 100Mbps, but about a year later, when that development was full of kids and teens, his actual broadband speeds dropped down to less than 100Kbps from about 2:30PM till 7PM; due to all the kiddies getting on the Internet when they got home from school. Fortunately for him, that mellowed out over the next few years and the cable provider changed two or three times; possibly making improvements along the way. His cable speeds are relatively stable and as advertised these days.

Yep. A co-worker of mine (basically, Linux version of me) moved home to a rural area had to deal with the same thing. Only provider offered 360-768Kbps ADSL and had a monopoly because no one else would service the county due to the low population density. My friend ended up setting up his own family-run ISP, and now has his own datacenter with gigabit speed and several hundred households as customers. I dread that at some point he'll want to do it full-time and I won't have anyone to do geek stuff with at work.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

V.T. Eric Layton, on 17 April 2017 - 01:56 PM, said:

A friend of mine, who has a home on 7 acres in what used to be a farming/rural area of the county, had dial-up initially. However, a couple years later they build a huge (800 home) development right adjacent to his property. Once they did that, the cable company that was servicing the new development offered service to him also. It was advertised at 100Mbps, but about a year later, when that development was full of kids and teens, his actual broadband speeds dropped down to less than 100Kbps from about 2:30PM till 7PM; due to all the kiddies getting on the Internet when they got home from school. Fortunately for him, that mellowed out over the next few years and the cable provider changed two or three times; possibly making improvements along the way. His cable speeds are relatively stable and as advertised these days.

We have a similar problem in remote areas where I live. That's most of my county actually, which features a bunch of little towns and a lot of moose pasture. There was an ISP that served the area with wireless Internet similar to what you get with a mobile phone but they have withdrawn from the market. A lot of rural folks here are still only able to get dial-up. Amazing in this day and age.

Surprisingly, a lot of people seem to have set up rural ISPs. I suspect it is more common than people realize, but because it is so localized you don't necessarily hear about it outside of the served market.